


Piece of Cake

by amiraculousladybug



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Short One Shot, post-reveal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 04:26:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5771290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amiraculousladybug/pseuds/amiraculousladybug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adrien and Marinette team up for a school bake sale, but Marinette wasn't expecting Adrien to be quite so inept at baking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Piece of Cake

“A bake sale?” Marinette echoed as most of the students around her slumped down in their seats with a collective groan.

“This will help to raise money for the class trip next month,” Miss Bustier explained over the loud complaints of the other students, “so I want everyone to participate by bringing something in. It doesn't need to be anything fancy.” She laid a piece of paper down at the front of her desk. “Sign up here and write down what you'll be making.”

Adrien raised his hand. “Are we allowed to do this in pairs?”

Miss Bustier thought for a moment. “I don't see why not,” she decided. “Just make sure to put both your names down.”

Almost immediately, students began clustering to decide who would be pairing up with whom. No one seemed to want to make something by themselves. Marinette started to ask Alya if she wanted to work together, assuming the blogger wouldn't want to bake by herself either, but stopped when Adrien turned around in his seat to look at her.

“Do you want to bake together?” he offered with a smile.

Marinette felt her heart do a wild leap inside her chest. No matter how many times Adrien invited her to do something with him, it never became any less thrilling than it had been the first time. She had already opened her mouth to say yes when she remembered that she had been about to ask Alya. “Um …”

“She would love to,” Alya answered for her. She gave Marinette an encouraging wink.

Adrien was still looking at Marinette, waiting for her confirmation, although his expression had brightened at Alya's response. She glanced over at Alya. “What about you?” she whispered.

“Nino and I can work together,” Alya replied dismissively. “Don't let me get in the way of your date with Adrien. You two have fun.”

“Thanks,” Marinette said. Turning to Adrien, she answered, “Yes, absolutely.”

His smile broadened in delight. “Great! I'll sign us up, then.” And he stood up to go do just that.

~

“So, um … how do we do this, exactly?”

Marinette raised an eyebrow at Adrien and tried not to laugh at the clueless expression on his face. “You mean you signed us up to bake a cake and you don't have any idea how to make one?”

His face reddened, and he scuffed the toe of his shoe against the tiled floor of the bakery in embarrassment. “Everyone else was signing up to make cookies and brownies,” he mumbled. “I wanted us to do something different.”

God, how did he manage to be so endearingly cute? Marinette went to fetch them both aprons so he wouldn't see the blush spreading across her cheeks. As Chat Noir, he always seemed so mischievous and quick to flirt; much of that devilish confidence disappeared when he was Adrien, replaced with adorable shyness. The shift still took some getting used to sometimes. She almost hadn't believed him when he had finally revealed his identity to her. “All right, kitty, let's get started, then,” she said, tossing one of the aprons she had grabbed to him. She tied the other apron around her waist. “We'll need a mixing bowl and two baking pans. They should be on that rack over there.”

Adrien went over to the rack she had indicated while Marinette went to fetch the ingredients they would need for the cake. He grabbed a bowl that was much too small and pans that were much too large, and Marinette, giggling, sent him back to the rack. She laid the ingredients out on the counter neatly. Tikki and Plagg watched the two of them in amusement from atop the refrigerator, where they nibbled on cream cheese puffs swiped from the day-old leftovers.

“Is it really safe for you to be calling me kitty here where your parents might overhear?” Adrien asked as he searched for the properly sized mixing bowl.

She shrugged. “They're down in the bakery. It should be fine.” He approached with a different bowl and pans in hand, and she nodded in approval. “Besides, there's nothing wrong with using a nickname when we're dating, right?” It was a struggle not to stutter on the word “dating,” even though they had been in a relationship for over a month now.

Adrien set the bowl and pans down, grinning. He'd clearly noticed her getting flustered over saying they were dating. He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her in against his chest. “Nothing wrong with it at all,” he agreed. “Well, Purr-incess, I've fetched the mixing bowl and the baking pans you asked me for. What do you need me to do next?”

She elbowed him gently to make him let go, rolling her eyes at the bad pun but smiling despite herself. “Help me measure out the ingredients.”

About twenty minutes later, Marinette had come to the conclusion that Adrien was not cut out to be a baker. Or any sort of cook, for that matter. There was flour and baking soda all over the countertop and the floor, as well as smeared across their faces and aprons (Marinette was glad she had remembered to grab aprons for them), and four eggs had lost in accidental contests against gravity. Once the surviving eggs had successfully been added to the cake batter, the two of them had ended up spending several minutes picking bits of eggshell out. Then Adrien had accidentally set the mixer to high speed, sending batter flying out of the mixing bowl. There had been a mad scramble to turn the mixer off. And now there was quite a bit of spilled batter to clean up—as if the flour, baking soda, and smashed eggs hadn't been enough. Marinette grabbed a dishrag to start wiping down the counter while the cake was in the oven. “Well,” she remarked, “that wasn't too bad.” It was the understatement of a lifetime, but she didn't want Adrien to feel any worse about his baking than he already did.

“You don't have to lie, my lady,” Adrien said. He grabbed a dishrag as well, and began helping her with the cleanup. “That went terribly.”

She bit her lip. He was right; the making of the batter had been an unmitigated disaster. She wasn't about to say that out loud, though. “Did I ever tell you about the first time my father tried to teach me how to bake something?”

He looked up from the egg he was wiping off the floor. His eyes were full of curiosity. “No.”

“He was teaching me how to bake bread,” Marinette explained. She could remember like it had happened yesterday. “And he decided to let me put in the yeast myself. I got a little too excited about it and ended up putting way too much in. You can imagine what happened next.”

Adrien stifled a laugh. “I bet he kept you away from the yeast after that.”

Marinette smiled. It seemed like her story had made him feel at least a tiny bit better. “For a while, yeah. He let me help out again when I got older. But nobody ever does perfectly on their first try, kitty. It takes practice.” She knelt down beside him on the floor and helped him to clean up the eggs. “Even for people as multi-talented as you.”

Cleanup must have taken longer than she realized, because she and Adrien were still cleaning off the floor and counter when the timer for the oven went off. She dropped her rag and went to take the cake out of the oven. “It looks good,” she reported, pulling on a pair of oven mitts. “Smells good, too. See, it didn't turn out so bad after all.” She slid the two baking pans out of the oven and brought them over to the cooling rack. Adrien came over, looking anxious. His expression perked up when he saw that the cake wasn't ruined.

“We can finish cleaning while it cools,” Marinette suggested. “That way we don't have to sit around and do nothing while we wait to frost it.”

“I'll finish up the cleaning,” Adrien said. When she tried to protest, he put a finger to her lips. “I'm responsible for most of the mess, and you've already cleaned plenty of it. I can take care of the rest.”

She sighed and leaned back against the counter. “I guess there's no arguing with you. Go ahead.” She felt a little useless, just standing there while he did the rest of the cleaning, but she could tell this was his way of apologizing and didn't want to make light of his apology. After a few minutes of watching him, she decided it wouldn't hurt to get the frosting out. Might as well have it on standby for when the cake had cooled down, and the cake should be cooled enough to frost shortly.

“It smells wonderful,” Tikki remarked, coming down from the fridge to see Marinette and Adrien's handiwork. “I bet it'll sell really fast at the bake sale.”

Marinette smiled. “I hope so.” She slid another cream cheese puff over to her kwami and went to fetch a container of frosting and a pair of knives.

Adrien had just finished when Marinette set the frosting and knives down on the counter by the cake. “Time to frost?”

“Yup,” she confirmed. She handed him a knife and the container of frosting, and carefully removed the two layers of cake from their pans. “You frost that one, and I'll take care of this one. Try to make sure that the frosting is even all the way around.”

He smiled. “Piece of cake, my lady.”

Easier said than done.

“I can put another layer of frosting on to make it look a little more uniform,” Marinette suggested. Adrien's frosting job had come out rather clumsily, and they had elected to use that layer as the bottom so as to hide the worst of it. She couldn't say she was surprised, but it did mean a sloppy job on the sides of the cake as well. Adding more frosting was the easiest way to go about hiding the rest of Adrien's messy work.

“That would probably be a good idea,” Adrien agreed. “But before you do that, you've got a little bit of frosting on your face. Let me get it for you.” Before she could protest that she could get it herself, he leaned down and kissed her, lingering much longer than was necessary.

When he had moved back, she raised an eyebrow at him. “There wasn't really any frosting, was there?”

“Nope,” he admitted, smiling without so much as the slightest trace of repentance.

Marinette sighed, but couldn't help returning his smile. “Silly kitty. My turn now.” She wiped a streak of frosting from his cheek—how on earth had he managed to get it there in the first place?—and then stood on tiptoe to kiss him back.

Fixing the frosting on the cake could wait for a little while.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally a request from a Miraculer on Tumblr. You can find it there on my blog's ML fanfics link (the url is jesus-otaku).


End file.
